Let bygones be recycled

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To borrow Neville Wran's useful metaphor, the blowtorch is about to be applied to the ample belly of Mark Latham.

The heat will be turned up. The honeymoon is over. With the election perhaps weeks away, the Opposition Leader's past is even now being trawled for any nastiness which might show him unfit to be prime minister.

The process begins tomorrow with a longish Latham profile on Channel Nine's Sunday program. Sunday's executive producer, John Lyons, told me it would be "balanced and fairly reasonable, but there will be some things in it he won't like".

One of those things will be a new allegation about some sort of punch-up with a campaign worker early in Latham's political career. And that famous biffing of a taxi driver will also get an airing again.

Lyons rejects any suggestion that he is pimping for the Liberals. He points to a savaging his program gave the Government over East Timor not so long ago, which inspired an outraged Lord Downer to brand him a tool of the ALP.

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C'est la guerre. The fact remains that the Opposition Leader is in for a torrid time. At last count there were no fewer than six books being written about him.

The prima donnas of the Canberra press gallery, too, are grizzling that he has vanished from the media. Wrong. He's just not talking to them. In fact, he gave long interviews to Channel Nine on Thursday and to John Laws on Friday.

But the Murdoch papers have gone feral, led by The Australian - or The American, as I call it these days - which has shown remarkable ingenuity in daily spinning an anti-Latham line from the thinnest strands of fact and fevered editorial imagination.

A few weeks ago, his remark to me on radio that he would at least consider leaving Australian troops in Baghdad to protect our diplomats was furiously beaten-up by The American into a backdown on his policy of bringing our forces home by Christmas. It was no such thing.

The man himself professes to be unconcerned. "I've got nothing to worry about in my past particularly, but if people want to focus on it I think they do the public a disservice because Australians are interested in good public policy for the future," he told reporters on Thursday.

We shall see about that. For the moment, the last word goes to the Prime Minister who, po-faced as ever, assured the ABC's Lateline this week that he abhors personal attacks.

"I don't like them," he said. "I think people's private lives, and you know what I mean by that, we all know what we mean by that, I don't think those things should be dragged into politics."

Perish the thought.

SLOWLY but inexorably, the walls are closing in on James Hardie, the building products company which has cleverly teleported its corporate headquarters to the Netherlands, thus placing itself well out of reach of persons wanting to sue for compensation for asbestos poisoning.

The ins and outs of this slick manoeuvre are complex. But to cut a long story short, James Hardie did a runner. Platoons of high-powered lawyers were hurled into action. In 2001, faced with exploding claims for compensation, it hived off two subsidiary companies that made the lethal asbestos products that have killed thousands of Australians.

Blithely tiptoeing through the Dutch tulips a world away, James Hardie set up a trust in Australia - the amusingly named Medical Research and Compensation Foundation - to pay the compo bill.

The foundation has, or perhaps had, $293 million to meet claims over 20 years. But new figures suggest it is roughly $1.3 billion short of what will actually be needed.

This, and a great deal more, is coming out - it is like pulling teeth - in a State Government inquiry headed by David Jackson, QC.

And things began to go seriously pear-shaped this week. Counsel assisting the inquiry, John Sheahan, SC, bowled up a list of "issues" suggesting senior executives of James Hardie Industries might have misled the NSW Government, the NSW Supreme Court, the Australian Stock Exchange, and the board of the compo foundation. If so, very naughty.

But the company stoutly denies any funny business, maintaining it took off for Holland for tax reasons, and it argues that it has no more asbestos liability.

And the corporate PR flacks have laboured mightily to keep any unpleasantness out of the mainstream news media.

In that, at least, they have failed. James Hardie is now four-square in the spotlight. To the chagrin of the shareholders, the story will run and run.

Some 700 Australians die of asbestos poisoning each year.

I HAD planned to write a bit about Iraq in this column, some helpful thoughts on the hasty and furtive departure of the American pro-consul in Baghdad, Paul L. Bremer III.

But I don't have a flak jacket. And as we have seen on television lately, body armour is essential if you are reporting on Iraq in any capacity, at any distance from the action.

Jim Waley, Nine's news anchor, has sported a fetching blue flak jacket in his live reports from the Iraqi capital this week. Jim is a nice bloke and a terrific journalist but, frankly, he looked like a Qantas hostie demonstrating cabin safety before take-off. Enough!

Plenty that's
good about
the arches

As the food police would have it, the McDonald's golden arches are the evil symbol of the American capitalist beast at its wicked worst. Greedy, unscrupulous, Macca's bombards our kiddies with advertising cunningly designed to hook them for life on its dangerous diet of fats and sugars. The Big Mac is the source of all the ills of the Western world.

An American filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, has won global fame with a doco movie, Super Size Me, in which he ate only McDonald's fast food three times a day for a month. He reports that he put on 10 kilos and ended up sick and depressed, with "severe sexual dysfunction". He has been showered with filmmaking awards.

At which point I break ranks with the food fascists. Sorry, but I happen to like McDonald's. Eaten occasionally, the food is tasty and filling. The restaurants are clean and efficient. The company provides useful jobs and experience for literally thousands of kids, a good many of whom are battling students using the money to pay their way through university. Macca's offers its most promising people scholarships to do business and economics degrees, and it donates large sums to hospital and medical charities.

Super Size Me is plainly a dodgy exercise. This Spurlock may well have become as sick as he claims, but logic suggests he would have ended up much the same if he'd lived for a month on any artificially restricted diet, be it caviar blinis, steak and potatoes, or nuts and berries.

McDonald's is big enough to look after itself, but I think it has copped a bum rap.